Modern Colonization by Medical Intervention

Modern Colonization by Medical Intervention adds to our understanding of the political and economic transformations establishing colonial modernity in Puerto Rico. By focusing on influential physicians’ clinical work and their access to a remote and inaccessible rural population, this volume details how rural areas suffered the ravages of social dislocation, unemployment and hunger. The colonial administration’s hookworm campaign involved many Puerto Rican physicians in complex struggles with other elites, rural peasants and U.S. colonial administrators for political legitimacy. Puerto Rican physicians did not gain the professional autonomy their counterparts in the United States enjoyed. Instead, they became centrally implicated in the struggle between labor and capital enforcing the island’s subordination to a colonial modernity and the development of capitalism on the island.

Nicole Trujillo-Pagán, Ph.D. (2003), University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Latina/o Studies at Wayne State University. She has published articles and book chapters on Latinos and state policy.

"Trujillo-Pagán’s book is provocative, and invites scholars most likely from history, anthropology, medicine, and public health to read, and why not, do similar tasks in colonial and postcolonial scenarios. [... Her] analysis provides analytic tools for critically approaching and understanding medical interventions, the emergence of public health, and the clashes that emerge between allopathic medicine and other ways of understanding death and sickness under processes of modernization and colonialism. [...] This book is an invitation to create post-Foucauldian analyses in the tropics to reveal power and resistance relationships in the context of medical and public health discourses and practices.
Héctor Camilo Ruiz Sánchez (University of Pittsburgh, USA), International Sociology Reviews 2015, Vol. 30(5) 467–471.